Leisure Reading Collection

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." So begins Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's perfect comedy of manners--one of the most popular novels of all time--that features splendidly civilized sparring between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet as they play out their spirited courtship in a series of eighteenth-century drawing-room intrigues.

Follow Alice on her fanciful journey down the rabbit hole and through the mirror where she meets friends and foes like the Mad Hatter, Cheshire Cat, the Jabberwock, and the Caterpillar!

Detective Sam Spade is a private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. When his partner is killed during a stakeout, he is drawn into the hunt for a fantastic treasure with a dubious provenance—a golden bird encrusted with jewels. Also on the trail are a perfumed grifter named Joel Cairo, an oversized adventurer named Gutman, and Spade’s new client Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime.
These are the ingredients of Dashiell Hammett’s coolly glittering gem of detective fiction, a novel that has haunted generations of readers.

A classic tale of jealousy, vengefulness and passion, it is widely regarded as a classic of English literature. The novel brings out Emily Brontë 's mastery of an extremely complex structure, acute evocation of place and poetic grandeur of vision. Emily died on December 19, 1848, at the young age of thirty. She knew nothing of the success which Wuthering Heights was to be finally accorded with. - Amazon

When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master, Mr Jones, and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. But gradually a cunning, ruthless elite among them, masterminded by the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, starts to take control. Soon the other animals discover that they are not all as equal as they thought, and find themselves hopelessly ensnared as one form of tyranny is replaced with another. Orwell's chilling 'fairy story' is a timeless and devastating satire of idealism betrayed by power and corruption.
Since its publication fifty years ago, Animal Farm has become one of the most controversial books ever written. It has been translated into seventy languages and sold millions of copies throughout the world.
(A stage adaptation can be found at PR6123.O654A78 2004.)